Spain Wins The World Cup (of Bonuses)

Spain is reportedly the country offering players the biggest bonus to win the World Cup.

Last week, El País — Spain’s biggest newspaper — reported that Spanish players stand to receive a cool 720,000 euros each, in case they again secure the cup they won in South Africa in 2010.

That, according to El País, is twice as much as offered to the players of the other two squads widely seen as World Cup favorites, Brazil and Germany —- and it doesn’t take gifts for the players into account, including shopping vouchers and luxury watches.

Such largesse may help explain why Spain’s national squad is traditionally an internal squabbling-free zone, win or lose, despite a heavy contingent of players who come from regions such as the Basque Country and Catalonia, where many couldn’t care less about the national squad. Just compare Spain’s collegial spirit to serious infighting in recent World Cups, for instance, in the case of the French team.

In any case, Spain’s soccer federation declines to confirm or deny El País’ report, and most other federations contacted by The Wall Street Journal have responded in similar ways.

Only Chile’s has confirmed its bonus policy, and it’s a pretty substantial one too: Héctor Olave, the federation’s chief officer, says half of the FIFA reward for the champion—which stands at $35 million — will be handed to the players if they are world champions. That amounts to around 562,000 euros for each of the 23 players in the Chilean squad.

Some may object that the exercise is a tad academic: after all, there’s only a very low likelihood that Chile actually wins the World Cup —-Skybet, an Internet gambling firm, offers 40-1 odds on that happening, compared with 6-1 for Spain and 11-4 for Brazil—but the issue of bonuses is more serious than that.

Thomas Brookes, the founder of International Football Management, a soccer management firm, notes that bonuses have traditionally been a sticking point in poorer, less successful nations, particularly in Africa. There, many federations are cash poor or not entirely well-functioning, and players often complain of misuse of funds, Mr. Brookes explains.

A good example of that came over the weekend, when Cameroon’s national squad refused to board the plane taking them to Brazil over a dispute over earlier, unpaid bonuses due after Cameroon’s successful campaign to qualify for the World Cup.

The dispute was finally settled and Cameroon’s squad is already in Brazil, but controversies about bonuses are unlikely to stop there.

In Spain, centrist party UPyD is complaining about the size of the promised bonuses, at a time when the country’s government is still applying austerity cuts on public spending. This is a seriously daring political move in a country where the World Cup winners have attained a status not very distant from that of demigods or, at least, youngish statesmen.

“These (bonuses) just come to show that this is a society that lost all sense of proportion, in which one spares no resources for some things, and then can’t find resources for the things that really matter,” says Carlos Martínez Gorriarán, an UPyD member of parliament.

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